B. F. Skinner

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They're not creating it; they're not initiating anything. It's all found somewhere else. That's an awful lot to relinquish.

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?

I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.

The consequences of an act affect the probability of it's occurring again.

Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.

The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.

We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.

I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.

I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.

I'm very pessimistic.

Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

A failure is not always a mistake. It may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.

A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.

You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.

If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

Reinforcement is being right.

If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.